It wasn't until my fifth year that I began selecting units to
merely touch upon and other units to dive deep into, but in a class
based on chronology, that can be difficult for students. I was never
much into the European Middle Ages, but I couldn't breeze over it and
expect my students to understand why the European Renaissance emerged.

About my seventh year, I began to wonder, "What's this all about?
Who cares about DaVinci? Who cares about the Roaring Twenties? Who cares
about Sun Tzu? Who cares about any of this history?

What's the point?"

I mean, I care, because I nerd out over it. I'm guessing most historians do. But I'm also guessing many kids don't.

I run into people all the time who say, "I hated history as a kid,
but I like it now." They also can't tell me anything about their
history class, except for how boring the teacher was, but they can tell
me about whatever history interests them today. Why does that happen?

Why do students hate history?

—Getty

I'm pretty sure it's a diverse list of reasons, but usually students who dislike my class say it is boring."Why is it boring?" I ask.

Students often answer with something along the lines of, "How is
learning about the Treaty of Versailles going to help me in life?"

Good question.

It makes me question whether the content should be the focus.

What is it about the social studies that's most important to my students?

My answer: strengthening their thinking skills.

I want my students to think. I want them to make reasoned
decisions that consider the many variables of an event. I want them to
understand a decision's consequences, for the long term as well as the
short. I want them to understand how others will be affected by the
decision. And I want them to act accordingly.

If my goal is, as the Ohio Department of Education puts it, to
"prepare students to be participating citizens," then it seems that I
want to challenge students' decisionmaking, and to provide them with the
opportunity to take action.

And it makes sense that students can practice those decisionmaking skills with any subject—not a boring one.

Why does history have to be taught through a chronology of topics?

Why do my students have to learn about the fall of Rome or the
East India Trading Co.? Maybe one of them would like to focus on
elections in Burundi.

Textbooks are often written with brief and incomplete details,
blowing through the specifics, kind of like how a teacher who isn't
comfortable with the subject matter would teach a topic. This method
misses out on the many variables that matter in understanding cause and
effect.

Textbooks also tend to dismiss the humanity of the subject—akin to telling a story with no main character.

“If we want our students to
make reasoned decisions,
then they’ll have to be
able to understand the
complicated mix of people,
places, and things that
lead to an outcome.”

If we want our students to make reasoned decisions, then
they'll have to be able to understand the complicated mix of people,
places, and things that lead to an outcome.

My students ask questions that show how perceptive they are. They
realize that there are gaps in a lesson, or that I've breezed over
something. I could run with that awareness, answering the students'
questions, fulfilling the so-called "teachable moment," but why not let
the students discover the answer on their own?

Unfortunately, our courses aren't designed this way. They are not à
la carte. The menu is set, and the dishes are going to come out in the
same order every time. And because the structure is already set, a
student looks at her text and thinks: "Oh, well, that question isn't in
here, so it won't be on the test, so let's just move this along. What's
on the next page, I wonder? Oh, vulcanization. How awfully
exhilarating."

I could construct a lesson that leaves a gap open for all of my
students to practice inquiry skills and develop a conclusion, which I
do. But might there be other options that attract the students—that
allow them to decide what they like, instead of giving me that choice?

Why not let each student decide what gap he or she wants to
research and solve, instead of demanding that all students have a
similar learning experience with the same topic?

Rather than a standardized chronology of events, why not choose
one topic to dive deep into for the semester, allowing the students to
really tear the topic apart, providing them with the necessary details
to make valid arguments?

If one topic per semester sounds a little extreme, try four topics
during the course of a semester. The point is that fewer topics, with a
concentration on depth, will allow the richness of the history to
attract the students.

As history classes are currently designed, time is a huge issue. "How am I supposed to get through 5,000 years of history?"

Teachers are deeply and constantly concerned with time, and for good reason.

"I can't spend any more time on the Korean War because I have to
be to Watergate by next week, and I still have to cover the civil rights
movement to adequately prepare my students for the test."What hogwash. All the students need in order to practice their
social studies skills is one of those topics. They are all fascinating.
Let's choose one.

A semester could be based on the themes Inquiry, Analysis, and
Solutions, and teachers could let those concepts guide the course,
instead of the label Western Civilization. A course that focuses on
methods could choose five interesting and unrelated events or people to
study in depth.

Social studies is just that: studying society. We love to try to
build equations about how society and the people within it will act.
Economics tries to predict these trends all the time, but there really
is no way to predict with any consistency what a person will do. Because
there is a level of uncertainty about human behavior, we try to
categorize it and make sense of it. We attach names to eras and titles
to chapters, and we stick it in a book, and we call it history.

"Here is what happened in the past," we say. "Phew, we got that figured out."And then a student asks a question: "Why is the U.S. prison population so high?"And then we're like, "Oh, that's not on the test, let's get back
to the timeline" and the kid's curiosity is shattered, and they're like,
"History's boring." ----------

Greg Milo is the social studies department chair at Archbishop
Hoban High School in Akron, Ohio, where he is beginning his 13th year.
He can be reached at milog@hoban.org and on Twitter at @Mr_Greg_Milo.